Google Outage: Web Traffic Dips 40% During 5 Minute Blackout

All of Google's services – including Search, Gmail, and YouTube – went down briefly during the blackout on Friday evening, leaving users in the dark and unable to access them for what the firm's Apps Status Dashboard claimed was between one and five minutes.

A message on the Google Apps Dashboard at the time said that all of its services were hit.

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users," Google reported. "The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour."

"Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50 to 70 percent of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes."

Although Google was down for less than five minutes, it seems that the Internet as a whole suffered greatly as a result.

"This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into [our] real-time tracking – around a 40 percent drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows," web analytics firm Gosquared said. "That's huge. As Internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge. It's also of note that pageviews spiked shortly afterwards, as users managed to get to their destination."

It's suspected that ithe blackout has cost the Internet services firm a fair amount of money. Google refused to comment about why the blackout occurred.

About the author

Prior to working at The INQUIRER, Lee was sponsored by the NCTJ to do a multimedia journalism course in London. After completing placements at local magazines and newspapers in both print and online he wrote for an online gaming news website, and it was here where his love for technology grew.